() — The James Webb Space Telescope took a remarkably detailed image of a nearby dwarf galaxy. The near-infrared view reveals the deepest view yet of a stellar landscape that could offer astronomers an ideal means of studying aspects of the early universe.
The image shows a panoply of stars within a solitary dwarf galaxy called Wolf-Lundmark-Melottewhich is about 3 million light-years from our home galaxy, the Milky Way, and is about one-tenth the size.
The WLM galaxy is intriguing to astronomers because it has remained largely isolated and has a similar chemical composition to galaxies in the early universe, according to POT.
The Webb telescope, which launched in December 2021, is the most powerful space observatory to date. It is able to detect the faint light of incredibly distant galaxies when they glow in infrared light, a wavelength invisible to the human eye.
The Hubble Space Telescope and the now-defunct Spitzer Space Telescope have taken images of the WLM galaxy, but Webb used his near-infrared camera, also called NIRCamto capture it in unprecedented detail.
“We can see a myriad of individual stars of different colors, sizes, temperatures, ages, and stages of evolution; interesting clouds of nebular gas within the galaxy; foreground stars with Webb diffraction spikes; and background galaxies with ordered features like tidal tails,” said Kristen McQuinn, an assistant professor in the department of Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, in a commentary published in the NASA website. A tidal tail is a thin “tail” of stars and interstellar gas that extends from a galaxy.
“It’s really a beautiful image,” added McQuinn, who is one of the show’s lead scientists. Webb Early Release Science.
What’s WLM like?
? Galactic neighbor: 3 million light-years away
? Antisocial: Hasn’t interacted with nearby galaxies
? Old school: Similar chemical makeup to early universe galaxiesThis makes WLM ideal for studying how stars in the early universe may have formed & evolved. pic.twitter.com/iWMYnVaofk
— NASA Webb Telescope (@NASAWebb) November 9, 2022
On Twitter, NASA’s official Webb Telescope account stated that, compared to previous images from the space observatory, Webb’s NIRCam image “makes the whole place glow,” a reference to the song “Bejeweled” from the new album. Taylor Swift’s “Midnights.”
Some of the stars depicted in this latest Webb image are low-mass stars that formed in the early universe and can survive for billions of years, McQuinn noted on the NASA site.
“By determining the properties of these low-mass stars (such as their ages), we can gain insight into what was happening in the very distant past,” he said.
‘s Ashley Strickland contributed to this report.
